


Growing Up

by Face_of_Poe



Series: The Conway Cabal [11]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Foster Care, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Orphanage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-27 21:36:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18199619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Face_of_Poe/pseuds/Face_of_Poe
Summary: Despite the perfect location, set almost precisely in the middle between Manhattan and Albany, Alexander has thus far avoided visiting the Rensselaer Residential School.





	Growing Up

**Author's Note:**

> Set shortly after _Going Home_.

He knows the location came down to luck and finances more than anything else, but he can’t help but think the universe conspired in some way to place the Rensselaer Residential School almost perfectly in the middle between Manhattan and Albany.

A cozy campus near Poughkeepsie, set behind a security gate and enough trees to make the drive back like entering a whole different world, the old balances against the new. The Board had been keen to maintain _some_ of the character of the property’s original purpose, a small, private women’s college disbanded a decade ago, but it’s not difficult to sort which areas had been prioritized for modernization and upgrade.

_Not_ among those areas was the looming brick administration building outside which he parks; down whose stairs a familiar, friendly, long-missed face comes descending with a smile that lights up her eyes and seemingly oblivious to the January chill. He steps out of the car and barely has time to get his door closed before he’s folded into Eliza’s arms.

“Oomph.”

She doesn’t let go. So he tightens his own hold and resigns himself to her hair fluttering about in the breeze and tickling his nose.

“Hey.” She squeezes once more, hard enough to wind him, and lets go enough to pull back and look at his face. “You okay?”

“Am _I_ okay?” she echoes, exasperation tinging her tone and her smile.

But she’s still smiling nonetheless, and he shrugs, rueful. “I’m fine. Aren’t you cold?”

“ _Not_ your most skilled diversion.” But she turns and leads the way back up the steps at a brisk clip.

Alexander follows more slowly. Takes the time to look around the expanse of the property he’s only ever seen in pictures. But he knows it well enough, through other avenues of supporting and realizing Eliza’s dream over these past several years.

The academic buildings adjacent to administration are dark and empty for the long winter break. But the dorms off in the distance have warm light glinting in some of the rooms, and spilling out of the lobby of one building when a pair of girls come dashing out and down the hill and out of sight towards the dining hall and the library.

“Most of the kids still around for the holidays?”

Eliza leads the way down an empty hallway; the soles of her tennis shoes squeak on the tile floors. “About seventy percent.”

He wonders if those are by and large the lucky ones. He doesn’t ask. Has always felt a weird divide between his own connection, however old and oblique, to Eliza’s work and his willingness to claim to _relate_ to it.

His story came with a happy ending most of these kids could only dream about, until this place opened eighteen months ago. And even here… well. No matter how attentive the teachers might be, how loving the house parents, a boarding school is a crowded substitute for a family.

They turn into a cozy office suite labeled _Elizabeth Schuyler, Director_ and she wastes no time pouring him a cup of coffee from a counter in the corner. They bypass her private office though and settle instead in a pair of squashy armchairs he suspects are usually used during supervised visitations with students.

It’s break, though. No classes, even the rest of the administrative staff must be working short hours. They have the place to themselves.

“So.” Eliza stretches out and taps at his knee with the toe of her shoe. “Alexander Hamilton. It must be pretty dire.”

He blinks. “Huh?”

“Alex, you have been one of my biggest cheerleaders since the day I declared the New York foster care system fundamentally broken. You have… advocated, and donated, and fundraised, and advertised and… _everything_ you could possibly fathom.”

“I mean, of course, beca-”

“You have never once _visited_.” His mouth snaps closed. “You even _pouted_ when you found out we asked Aaron to be our legal director. But you have not visited.”

“I’m still sore about that, by the way.”

She taps at his knee again, and with decided more force. “Excuse me, Mister Lawyer, for not wanting one of our most enthusiastic solicitors of donations to be justifying the foundation’s books.”

He knows that. _Has_ known that, from the start. But it’s that weird connection versus relation and maybe even versus a weird ingrained sense of _obligation_ , and he shrugs. “Is it weird if I say these kids make me feel guilty?”

“You’ve never met these kids,” she points out with a glint of teasing sparkle in her eye.

“I don’t have one of those _optimal outcome_ kinds of histories, is all.” He takes a long, slow sip of his hot drink and forces himself to hold her steady, curious gaze. “It’s a weird… when I was twelve and a half and staring down a complete and utterly hopeless abandonment I never could have imagined would be somehow _worse_ than my mother’s death six months earlier… a place like this would have sounded like a godsend. Live at school, no group homes, no random placements with strangers.”

He shrugs. “And yet those things were utterly unremarkable. And then I got a family I didn’t even really want at the time, and I know a lot of the kids who were selected to come here are here precisely _because_ the traditional system has been cruel to them, and I just…” He stops and starts, and blinks at her. “Jesus Christ, do I have foster care _survivor’s guilt_?”

A reluctant laugh escapes her and she shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. But I hope you’ve always known – you don’t have to justify your involvement with the school.” She bites her lip and adds, “And I _really_ hope you know that you don’t have a sign on your head that says _former foster kid, inquire inside for details_.”

“Oh, good, John took it down then.”

“Once a smartass, I see.”

He bows his head and waves one hand with a flourish. But Eliza’s still looking at him with an apprehension that urges him back onto more serious matters. So he puts down his mug and straightens up in his seat and tells her carefully, “Martha and Jack asked me to come.” Her posture unconsciously straightens to match his. “George was sicker and longer than the family let on. He never felt like he fully recovered from the pneumonia last winter.”

She nods, but doesn’t interrupt him.

So he swallows and sighs and tells her, “He called me when he got out of the hospital then, and asked me to be executor of his estate.” She blinks, expression quickly falling towards bafflement. He pulls a thick envelope out of his inner coat pocket, and the bafflement turns wary, a suspicion in the dart of her eyes that he finds reluctantly amusing. “This is the last piece of it.”

He hands it over; tries to, anyway. She shakes her head and won’t move her arm, so Alexander climbs out of his chair and takes her hand from her lap and sets the letter into it. “It won’t bite.” Still, she doesn’t move. “Do you want some privacy?”

That snaps her out of her paralysis. “No,” she counters quickly. “No, I just.” She wipes at one eye, and then laughs helplessly. “ _God_. I’m pathetic. Alright.”

George Washington meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Alexander may have been closer to him in their adult lives, but Eliza had known the man much longer – and that connection was fraught with its own emotional complications.

He couldn’t blame her sudden reticence. Not least for knowing already what lay inside the letter.

When she finally brings herself to open it, she peels the edges of the flap up like it’s the most delicate gift in the world. Slides out the heavy pages, and reads slowly, carefully, skipping not even a single marking on the letterhead as far as he can tell.

He anticipates the tears, and has a tissue at the ready when they come; and then forcibly fights from chuckling when she gets to an actual _figure_ and her eyes go comically wide.

“That’s… a lot of money.” She blinks once, twice – flips the paper over, like she’s expecting some note on the back to declare it all a big joke, reads the whole thing over again – more tears – and then lobs an accusing stare at Alexander. “Did you…?”

“Nope. We never talked about it.”

“Well… _fuck_ ,” she breathes.

He laughs – and then they both whip around to hear a scandalized voice from the doorway declare, “That is a _bad_ word, Miss Eliza.”

“Pip,” Eliza exclaims, before turning back and wiping discreetly at her face. She climbs to her feet and crosses to the door with her hands propped on her hips in faux sternness. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble with Mrs. Graham.”

The boy sidles past her with a winning smile; Eliza puts up exactly zero fight, and watches him with a resigned amusement that suggests to Alexander that this is a semi-regular occurrence. He glances about the empty office space before settling his attention on Alexander and coming to perch in Eliza’s abandoned seat so he can peer discerningly at him. “He your husband?”

Alexander coughs. “No,” Eliza answers with a pointed look overtop Pip’s head.

“Boyfriend?”

“ _Old_ friend,” she corrects. “This is Alexander. Why aren’t you at lunch?”

He shrugs. Entirely unfazed by this bout of rule-breaking. “Saw a new car. Wondered who was here.”

“You’re very observant.”

“I’m _booored_ ,” he whines, slinking down in his seat all of a sudden and sulking in his displeasure. “No class for three. Whole. Weeks. The library’s closed. It’s cold.”

Alexander can’t help the grin spreading over his face. Eliza gives him another, harsher look. “Why don’t you spend some time getting to know your housemates?”

“They’re _stupid_.”

“Pip.”

He unfolds a little from his slump and blinks up at her. Offers a barely contrite, “Sorry,” that nevertheless has the displeasure fading off of Eliza’s face.

A very sudden, sharp pang of regret lances through Alexander, that he’s avoided this for so long. Seeing Eliza in her element. The passion she has for this work. “How old are you?” he asks.

“Twelve,” the boy informs him succinctly, and Alexander wants to ask if _Pip_ is short for _pip-squeak_.

He’s very proud of his restraint.

“Hey,” Pip sits the rest of the way upright and peers at him through narrowed eyes. “I know you.”

“That seems highly unlikely.”

He jumps up and dashes through the open door of Eliza’s private office; reemerges before either of them can voice any objection, with a framed photo in hand. He shoves it in Alexander’s face, and he blinks several times to bring into focus the image of Rensselaer’s biggest fundraising event in the city five years ago. He and John in tuxedoes, Eliza and her sisters in ball-gowns, sitting around a table and beaming up at the camera.

“You _are_ observant.”

“He keeps us on our toes,” Eliza admits.

Pip jabs at John’s head in the picture and asks Eliza, “Is _he_ your husband?”

Eliza snorts. “He’s _his_ husband.”

“Huh,” Pip peers back down at the picture, brow furrowed. “I like his hair.”

“Me too,” Alexander mumbles; Eliza steps on his foot.

A door out in the hallway bangs open, and hasty footsteps precede an exasperated shout of, “Philip Frazer, you better not be bothering Mrs. Schuyler again.”

He turns a beseeching look on Eliza. “Can I hide?”

“ _Go_ ,” she points a stern finger out towards the hallway. “And gimme.”

He hands over the picture and sulks his way over to the doorway. “Bye then.”

“It was nice meeting you, Pip,” Alexander calls after him. “Enlightening, even.” He gets a half-hearted wave, and adds, “I’ll talk to Miss Eliza about keeping the library open during breaks, okay?”

Pip’s head appears back around the corner of the door, eyes wide and bright. “ _Would_ you?” And then he’s being ushered off, and Eliza and Alexander are left alone once more.

She gives him a frustrated look. “That kid is going to be crushed now if the summer library budget gets usurped by, I don’t know, keeping the dining hall running.”

Alexander grins and nods at the envelope forgotten on the low table between the armchairs where they’d been sitting. “First order of business for the Patsy Custis Memorial Endowment?”

Eliza snatches the letter back up, entirely forgotten during their brief and hilarious interlude. She looks like she wants to say something, but after opening and closing her mouth a couple of times, her eyes just well up all over again and she waves him off and turns away to find a tissue and blow her nose.

And just to get it out of the way all at once, he adds softly, “So – Philip, huh?”

“The name is _entirely_ a coincidence, and I will deny it ‘til I’m blue in the face if you tell anyone I have favorites.”

He pulls Eliza into a crushing hug to match the one she’d foisted upon him on his arrival. “He’d be so proud.”

She sniffs once. Dainty. “I know.” And then she pulls back and catches his eye; cocks her head curiously, like she’s trying to read something written in his eyes, on his face, and asks, “So – did Pip make you feel guilty?”

Alexander blinks once; and smiles and shrugs, and glances off in the direction where the boy is now long disappeared.

“No, he muses. “No, I guess not.”

It’ll be something to ponder on the drive home.


End file.
